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The six-year-old Chicago Restaurant Week, with its offers of specially priced prix-fixe menus at hundreds of eateries around the city, reportedly enticed a record 444,000 diners over ten days in 2012. Run by the city's tourism arm, Choose Chicago, Restaurant Week brought in more than $20 million last year (this year's is under way, concluding Sunday 10).

Cenk explains why Iceland is a perfect example for how bailing out citizens instead of banks can help an economy recover. Between 2001 and 2010, the median net worth in the U.S. dropped 20 percent. Meanwhile, Iceland invested in their middle class, provided debt relief for 25 percent of its citizens, and now the economy on the rebound.

Yandex may be the most popular search engine in Russia, but when Firefox 14 rolls out in the country Google will become the new default option for search. It's not clear why the decision was made, though Google and Mozilla did sign a three year revenue sharing agreement at the end of last year.

In what must surely be one of the stranger postscripts to a mass layoff ever, someone at GOOD magazine put up a blog post today thanking the magazine's readers for giving it 200,000 friends on Facebook.

I've been asked repeatedly from whence the name trailerpilot comes and I suppose an "about" tab is the place where that information belongs. I began using trailerpilot as a stage name for my work in choreography around 2003. I would tell people that not all my work would be credited to trailerpilot, but that all trailerpilot pieces would share certain attributes.

Last summer, upon emerging from Taylor Mac's five-hour theatrical extravaganza The Lily's Revenge at HERE in New York, I was charged with more than just the thrill of seeing a great show. The experience demanded I forge ahead, for the rest of my days, in a way that honored the why of my reaction.

Last week, we lost one of North America's most estimable, if underrecognized creators-artist and sculptor Elizabeth Catlett. Catlett was alive for nearly all of the 20th century, witnessing America progress (and regress), her art reflecting history, legacy, and reality of her world, guided by principals of social justice and accessibility.

Posted in Unscripted blog by Kris Vire on Mar 7, 2012 at 12:01am Steppenwolf Theatre Company will premiere Head of Passes, a new commissioned play by ensemble member Tarell Alvin McCraney directed by his fellow ensemble member and close collaborator Tina Landau, in the 2012-13 season.

Posted in Unscripted blog by Kris Vire on Feb 15, 2012 at 11:30pm Harvey Weinstein made it official this evening: Julia Roberts and Meryl Streep are attached to take on the fiery mother-and-daughter duo Barbara and Violet Weston in the film adaptation of August: Osage County.

Ayad Akhtar's intelligent, volatile drama finds no easy answers to questions of cultural assimilation and appropriation. Ayad Akhtar's tightly wound new work is a compact, stunning gut punch addressing the cultural affinities some of us are allowed to escape and those we aren't.

Kenneth Lonergan opens up about his masterpiece Margaret as it returns to the Siskel. The weary voice is familiar, but the attitude is not: On the phone, Kenneth Lonergan sounds a lot like the California dad he plays in Margaret. Unlike the father character, however, he's completely absorbed in our conversation.

Posted in Unscripted blog by Kris Vire on Feb 14, 2012 at 11:01pm Lookingglass Theatre Company says it will open its 25th season (!) this fall by revisiting Metamorphoses, Mary Zimmerman's 1998 adaptation of Ovid.

Mark Messing takes Mickle Maher's debate between Beethoven and Quasimodo to new operatic heights. Oobleck habitué Mickle Maher's much-admired 2001 piece The Hunchback Variations centered on a premise as odd as it was inspired: a panel discussion between composer Ludwig van Beethoven and fictional hunchback Quasimodo, former bell ringer at Notre-Dame de Paris.